“So as not to become meat we must return the jaguar's gaze. But in this encounter we do not remain unchanged. We become something new, a new kind of we perhaps aligned somehow with that predator who regards us as a predator.”
- Clarice Lispector
“Score without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau): Twelve Haiku, 1978” by composer John Cage is currently housed in the Princeton Library, which describes the piece as follows:
In this work, Cage, who is among the most influential composers and conceptual artists of the postwar avant-garde, duplicates the score with which he conducted his 1974 composition Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts. Inspired by the writings of the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the artist replaced conventional musical notation with small drawings of natural elements—seeds, animal tracks, and nests—drawn from Thoreau’s journal, which Cage selected and sequenced at random with the aid of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. He then divided each of the twelve bars into three sections of five, seven, and five measures, transforming the score into a visual, sonorous, and experiential haiku.
Brian Eno’s “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major” (on the B side of his album Discreet Music) took a canonical piece, Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, and “varied” it. Although some musicologists claim Discreet Music the origin of ambient music, the first ‘official’ ambient was Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which came three years later.
“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno explained. And there is movement from the word discreet, which connotes a quietude and reticence, to the word ambient, which suggests the creation of a certain environment.
The challenge Eno set for ambient music—-being simultaneously ignorable and interesting—reminds me of Proust, laying in bed, writing an entire world from his convalescence. Or maybe it reminds me of convalescence in general, and the way in which confinement, or restriction, or the constraint of the bed shapes the way objects are received and experienced.
In Eno’s telling, he was bedridden and unable to move when the inspiration for Discreet Music occurred. Recovering from a car wreck in 1970, a friend came over to visit him. As she was leaving, she asked him if she should put a record on, since he couldn’t rise to do this himself. This question about whether he wanted music feels tied to the question of what sort of environment he preferred to stew in. After putting on a record, the friend left. But the volume of the music was too low, the melody was “much too quiet,” and Eno couldn’t reach the record player to turn up the volume. “It was raining outside,” Eno recalls. “It was a record of 18th-century harp music, I remember”:
I lay there at first kind of frustrated by this situation, but then I started listening to the rain and listening to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain.
Discreet Music‘s B side performs a reinterpretation of its own with variations on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, “Fullness of Wind,” “French Catalogues,” and “Brutal Ardour.” On Eno’s instructions, the Cockpit Ensemble repeated parts of the score while gradually altering it, imbuing this familiar (not least from weddings) 17th-century piece with an otherworldly grandeur. Like their mistranslated-from-the French titles, these variations may in some sense be “mangled,” but they become all the more ambiguously evocative for it.
The liner notes from Eno’s Music for Airports.
And, of course, the opportunity to drop one of my favorite albums of Eno’s, namely, his collaboration with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on “Evening Star.”